January 25, 2000

I have a job interview in an hour for a Help Desk position at a local ISP. Wish me luck! All I can hope for is a decent sallary and a not-too-crapy ISP so my job won't be too difficult. Job interview went well.. though I found out this afternoon that I have another on friday for a tech support role at adultshop.com. Sweet!

There's 13" of snow so far, and my ISP has gone kaput, probably due to the weather - this has happened before, though usually it's an ice storm thing. So I'm mail-free, and, at worst, can look forward to about a hundred mailing list posts and personal messages once the mail server is functioning again.

The amount of time spent playing in the snow will depend on whether or not I can find my gloves.

I'm posting this via the free, plus free annoyances, AltaVista web-access thingy. The current version seems to be buggy - it keeps loading an ad graphic. I've had to open an extra window so that it can do its stuff and keep the annoyance to a minimum. But even then, when the ad loads, that window becomes the toplevel window on my screen, interrupting such things as the typing of this writeup. This is in addition to the ad that is permanently at the toppest-most level. There's a reason why AltaVista is only to be used in cases of dire emergency. "What do you want for free?"

Around 7:20am EST (about 22:20 UTC), my roommate curses. I thought that he thought that he missed his 8:00am class, and I mumbled something about it not being 8 yet, so he didn't miss any class. He said something about no, it is snowing a lot. He gets up and sees there is a message on the phone. He plays the message, and we hear that it is from college relations. I sit up, hoping...

In a very long-winded fashion, they say that all classes are canceled. Since I'm excited by now, I can't get back to sleep, which is why I'm here. Now I'm going outside, into the snow.

Woke up thinking I am in a different place, then realized, no, that’s edebroux.

Watched Bewitched, cleaned the living room a little, dug out an old sweater I never wear (laundry time), then got complimented on it all day.
After the staff meeting in the stockroom, I stayed to fill a cart with Nancy Drew and Harry fucking Potter. Patrick hung around for a while too though he didn’t seem to be doing anything. Came over to me and said, “It’s not polite to compliment a lady when there are other ladies present, so I waited. I just wanted to say that whatever you are doing to your hair, keep doing it, because, um, it’s just the cutest.” Why, Patrick. If I weren’t married.

Dan C. has the flu and if he makes me sick again there will be rotten hell to pay.

Dinner, I took my preemptive anti-sick chicken soup and Skellig and The Great Gatsby to the breakroom. Read three pages of Skellig before Patrick walked through and grabbed The Great Gatsby, sat down next to me and started rambling, overjoyed. I didn’t know it was his favorite author (except for Yeats, he says, but then Yeats is always the exception to anything). He paid $160 for a reproduction of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s handwritten manuscript, in pencil, with decipherable scratched-out passages. He read to me, page after page – he’d find a good part, start reading, and not want to stop. I wasn’t going to stop him.

I watched his hands. My hands have cuts and bruises from books – his just have cuts, but more of them – he works in magazines. Long thin red lines all over his hands. No covers to keep him from hundreds of paper cuts. Does he feel it anymore? I hardly notice when a book makes me bleed. Patrick’s rough and reddened hands held the book carefully, sure not to damage the spine.

“Then he kissed her,” he read. “At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. Through all he said, even though his appaling sentimentality, I was reminded of something - an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.”

Then Joel and Ethan got stuck in the freight elevator! But it was midnight and time to go home so I don’t know what happened.